The Last Supper Party is a free-admission monthly spoken word and music series curated by Kimi Sugioka and presented by San Francisco International Arts Festival(SFIAF). The series runs every third Wednesday at 7:00pm. The January program includes music by Emily Zisman and poetry by members of The Colossus Collective (Tony Aldarondo, Richard Loranger, Mary Magagna, RoojaMohassessy, Shizue Seigel and Norma Smith). There will be an open microphone to follow and the event will include complimentary snacks and beverages.
Event URL on SFIAF website: https://www.sfiaf.org/2024_lsp_jan_17
RSVP Link: https://www.sfiaf.org/20240117
BIOS
Emily Zisman is a Lyrical philosopher and storyteller of the contemporary human experience, Emily uses unabashed honesty and humor to punctuate the complexity of the entire escapade. Through songwriting, Emily seeks to foster healing and sincere connection by writing instinctually. She writes songs that excavate shame and shine a light on the goodness and humor buried under each painful moment.
Rooja Mohassessy is an Iranian-born poet and educator. She is a MacDowell Fellow and an MFA graduate of Pacific University, Oregon. Her debut collection When Your Sky Runs Into Mine (Feb 2023) was the winner of the 22nd Annual Elixir Poetry Award. Rooja has been featured on NPR, and her poems and reviews have appeared in Narrative Magazine, Poet Lore, RHINO Poetry, Southern Humanities Review, CALYX Journal, Ninth Letter, Cream City Review,Verse Daily, The Adroit Journal, New Letters, The Florida Review, Poetry Northwest, The Pinch,The Rumpus, The Journal, and elsewhere.
Tony Aldarondo has performed music and poetry in venues throughout the San Francisco Bay area …and once while standing up on a JetBlue airplane! He is also an actor and a voiceover artist. He is the author of three full-length poetry collections, Big Heart Poet, We Are Poets, and his latest Poet On The Run. Tony loves performing poetry in venues with live audiences and his favorite thing of all his being the best dad he can be to his two awesome teenage kids .
Mary Magagna comes from Rock Springs, Wyoming, and lives in Berkeley, California. She moved to San Francisco in 1968 and became a poet, an activist, and a nurse but not necessarily in that order. She was recently published in the fabulous Colossus: Body. Other publications include Willows Wept Review, The Catholic Agitator, Fiction 365, The Scribbler, Crone’s Words, and Milvia Street Journal. Five poems in Awakenings Review is upcoming. A collection of her early work, Seeing What’s Not There can be found on-line at sharpsgiving.com
Richard Loranger is a multi-genre writer, performer, musician, visual artist, and all-around squeaky wheel who has been working around the United States for over forty years. They have lived in many parts of the country, including New York, Austin, Boulder, Ann Arbor, Chicago, and San Francisco, and currently live and work in Oakland, CA. They are the author of Mammal, Unit of Agency, Be A Bough Tit, Sudden Windows, Poems for Teeth, The Orange Book, and ten chapbooks, and have writing in over 100 magazines and journals. You can find more about their work and scandals at www.richardloranger.com.
Norma Smith is a community scholar and social researcher based in the San Francisco Bay Area. She was born in Detroit and grew up in Fresno, California. She has worked as a journalist, editor, and writing coach, and as a conference and event organizer. Smith's writing has been published in scholarly, literary, and political journals. Nomadic Press published her first book of poems, Home Remedy (2017).
Shizue Seigel is a San Francisco writer and visual artist who grew up in segregated Baltimore, Occupied Japan, California skid rows and sharecropping camps. She received a Jefferson Award for supporting Bay Area BIPOC writers through her nonprofit, Write Now! SF Bay. She’s a San Francisco Arts Commission Artist Grant recipient and VONA/Voices fellow. Her eight books include five anthologies of Bay Area BIPOC writers and artists, most recently Uncommon Ground: BIPOC Journeys to Creative Activism. Her prose and poetry have been published in Away Journal, sPARKLE + bLINK, Eleven Eleven, Persimmon Tree, and elsewhere.